What Comes After

Sixteen-year-old Evangeline McKensey takes stock of her possessions in the old trailer from which she’s being evicted. Her mother, Viv, abandoned her in early July, and now, in early October, Evangeline is pregnant. She thinks of Daniel’s father and considers making him part of her plan to escape her circumstances.

Daniel’s murder and Jonah’s death received significant news attention. Katherine insisted on a Catholic mass for Daniel, and a student memorial was held at the high school. Both services were filled. Isaac arranged for a Quaker service at the Friends meeting that he and Daniel regularly attended. Isaac’s friend Peter meets him at the door and hugs him. As Isaac sits in the meeting for Daniel, he remembers Daniel as a newborn, at five years old, and at 14. He looks at Katherine, but she’s focused on her companion. After the meeting, Isaac slips out the back door and encounters Jonah’s mother, Lorrie. They share a tense moment before she hurries away.

Evangeline digs through the underbrush and dirt in the woods to find the bracelet that Jonah gave her. She looks at the houses on the hill and identifies Isaac’s house. She imagines being wanted and loved in a warm house but dismisses that possibility, promising it instead to her unborn child.

She remembers living in Seattle with her mother. They shared a one-bedroom apartment while Viv worked and Evangeline went to high school. Matt, Viv’s boyfriend, moved in with them. After several months, he started having sex with Evangeline. Viv caught them one day when she came home early from work. Viv blamed Evangeline and beat her. Viv and Evangeline left the next day and drove to Port Furlong, where Viv rented a trailer and insisted on homeschooling Evangeline for religious reasons. Two weeks later, Viv got a job and left Evangeline home alone all day.

After the service, Isaac thinks about how he came to live in the house. He met Katherine at a Quaker retreat in Pennsylvania, and they married a year later. She decided that they’d move to Port Furlong, Washington, to get away from her past and start fresh.

Katherine and Isaac restored the ground floor but ignored the second floor of the late-Victorian-era house. Daniel was born three years after they bought the house, and they were relieved when the Geigers moved in next door. Jonah became close with Daniel and the rest of the family. When Katherine and Isaac divorced and she moved out, Daniel moved upstairs even though he and Isaac hadn’t finished the restoration.

It’s dark when Isaac enters the house. He calls for his dog, Rufus, and notices that the door to the second floor is open. Isaac is concerned about this but writes it off as the settling movements of an old house. Before he goes to bed, he props a chair against the door to secure it.

Evangeline met Jonah and Daniel at the park two months after her mother left. She was sitting at a picnic table, letting herself dream about a happy future. The boys approached and offered her a beer. Daniel was talkative and self-centered, while Jonah was quiet and reserved. She was instantly drawn to Jonah and recognized part of herself in him. The three spent a few hours talking before the boys drove her toward home and let her out near the woods. She kissed Jonah’s cheek, shocking both boys, before hopping out and disappearing into the woods. When she looked back, she saw Jonah’s face lit up with joy.

Hours before dying, Jonah considers the nature of evil. His main concern is preventing Evangeline from feeling guilty over his death. He tries to identify the source of the evil inside that allowed him to kill. He wonders if evil, in prompting good to fight it, has an element of good in it. He remembers looking at comic book villains with Daniel when they were children. He equates that fascination with evil and seeing his father hit his mother in a parking lot. He also recalls the Quaker meetings that he attended with Isaac and wishes that he’d kept going to recapture the sense of calm he felt there.

Isaac slips in late to Jonah’s funeral to avoid talking with Lorrie. Afterward, he goes home and sits with Rufus on his lap, thinking about Jonah. Jonah was obviously lonely after his father, Roy, died by suicide and even before that, when the family struggled because of Roy’s mental health condition. Jonah often accompanied Isaac and Daniel to the Quaker meetings on Sunday mornings if he spent the night on Saturday. When Daniel stopped going, Jonah joined Isaac alone. Isaac believes that Jonah had a significant sense of the Divine. When Isaac gets up to go to the kitchen, Rufus follows him, and he remembers Rufus following Jonah the same way in the weeks before the murder.

Evangeline emerges from the woods and walks up the drive to Isaac’s house. She decides to stay outside and wait to be found rather than sneaking into the house or knocking on the door. As she waits in the yard outside, she feels a presence inside the house looking at her. She wonders for a moment if it’s Daniel’s ghost but decides that he wouldn’t want to face her after what he did. She sees Isaac standing at the window, eating alone.

Rufus wakes Isaac in the middle of the night, but after being let out, he disappears for 20 minutes. Isaac goes to look for him, and Rufus leads him to Evangeline. He asks if he can help her get home, and she tells him that she has no family, friends, or place to stay. He invites her in, embarrassed at the dirty kitchen, and fixes her a plate of lasagna. She unnerves him slightly because she exudes a sense of familiarity that seems out of place. She asks him to eat with her. Eating with another person awakens Isaac’s appetite, and he begins to feel less depressed.

After Isaac shows Evangeline her room, gets her some clothes, and assures her that she can shower whenever she likes, she thinks about Isaac. He looks different than she expected, has an inner solidity and strength, and dislikes any possibility of seduction. She showers and gets into bed, hearing Rufus against the door. She has trouble sleeping and recalls the last time she saw Daniel. He found her at the same picnic table one evening without Jonah. He sat with her and told her about his frustration over the football team’s lack of dedication. He invited her out to pizza, and she accepted, primarily out of hunger. He drove to the restaurant, and she imagined how nice it would feel to go in with him and be accepted, but he had her wait while he got it. He drove into the woods and led her down a trail and into a clearing.

Jonah remembers an afternoon when he and Daniel were 14. Jonah was in his backyard when Daniel came out of the woods, shirtless, carrying a bench and his BB gun, with Rufus trotting alongside him. Jonah offered to shoot with Daniel, but when he set up the cans, Daniel knocked them down. The boys tussled, as they often did, but Daniel held Jonah down and ground his hips into Jonah. For a moment, Jonah thought that Daniel would kiss him, but Rufus piled on top of them and broke the tension. After they shot targets, Jonah spotted what he thought was a rabbit and hit it. Rufus tore after the animal with Jonah’s encouragement and killed it, but then they discovered that it was the neighbor’s cat. Jonah became distressed, but Daniel reassured him that Rufus killed the cat. Jonah kept Daniel from punishing Rufus, and the boys buried the cat.

Isaac feels Evangeline’s presence as a kind of purification that highlights the mess that he let accumulate. The next morning, he sits down to create lesson plans for his classes, partly to watch for when Evangeline wakes up. He looks at Rufus curled up in the chair and recalls adopting him.

Daniel was seven and begging for a puppy, so Isaac and Daniel went to the animal shelter and looked at all the dogs. Only Rufus suited their family. Daniel and Isaac argued about who the dog looked at first, but when they brought him home, he was clearly in love with Daniel. Daniel named him Rufus and cuddled with him on the living room floor. He was a powerful dog when he was young, and one night, when Isaac let himself in through a side door, Rufus nearly attacked him. Later, Isaac found a mutilated fawn outside and nearly killed the dog, stopping only because Daniel begged him. Daniel said that Rufus was trying to save the fawn from coyotes, but Isaac always felt that seeing the pieces of fawn was a prophecy of danger to his son.

Evangeline comes into the kitchen. Isaac makes her eggs, and she does a load of laundry. Isaac asks if he can contact her family, but she tells him an intricate lie about her parents being dead and an aunt abandoning her. He pushes her on why she came to Port Furlong, and she says that it involved a boy. She says that she can go stay with friends in a neighboring town and will just get her laundry and go, but Isaac asks her to stay for the moment. She agrees, thinking of the cold and fear of the previous days, but refuses to trust Isaac.

Evangeline stays with Isaac, but he worries that she’ll leave. He compares her to a stray terrier he took in once, always looking for escape routes. He sits down with her and makes a plan for her to return to school. He sets two main rules: that she let him know where she is and that she be back for dinner. She agrees, grudgingly, and he arranges for her to get some new clothes. He notices the signs of her pregnancy and (without mentioning it) insists that she go to a doctor. She asks him to make the appointment for an obstetrician instead.